Jennifer > Recent Status Updates

Her description of waiting outside the bathroom in a hotel seemed strange to me, because en suite bathrooms became common in US hotels in 1908, with even earlier examples dating to the 1880s. Also, the idea of a hotel only heating the lounge sounds strange to me. British hotels must have been very different from US hotels back then.

"It transpired that the Nazis had indeed planned to take over [England's] country estates, although Hitler had his sights on Blenheim."

"Thus, the United States was a democracy that became a state; Britain was a state that was slowly democratized."

If you count land that was not yet part of the US but would become so later on, Alta California, New Mexico, and Florida were all settled by the Spanish by 1776. The oldest city in the US, St. Augustine, was founded by the Spanish. Santa Fe, also founded by the Spanish, is as old as Jamestown in Virginia.

"The weather could change so swiftly in a week or two that it was little wonder the traditional calendar was divided into twenty-four miniature seasons." Interesting. I'll have to do some more research on the traditional Japanese calendar.

"Passion breeds proficiency."

Every book in this series has mentioned an exchange of business cards multiple times. I had heard they were important in Japanese culture and that there's an elaborate etiquette for their exchange, so it's interesting to see this confirmed.

"...I’d say all that matters is whether the person cooking the food and the person eating it each understand where the other is coming from."

"There's no such thing as 'dessert' in Japanese cuisine." Really? Do they just not eat sweet things?

It's occurred to me from reading this page and "The Restaurant of Lost Recipes" that I really don't know all that much about the climate of Japan except that they must get very hot and humid summers similar to those of most of the US (they have the highest installed AC capacity in the world, followed by the US). But snow in Kyoto? I've seen pictures of snow in Hokkaido, but that's a lot further north.

"As long as you've really poured yourself into something - whether it's your job or anything else in life - someone will always turn up to carry on where you left off."

So, the impact of WWII on the bakery was mentioned, but in a different way than I was expecting.

At first, I thought that the continuity of the bakery's history (it was founded in 1928) would have been disrupted by WWII, but then I remembered that Kyoto was not heavily bombed, and so it makes sense that this was not mentioned.

"A man who’s given unto Caesar all that is Caesar’s, but also all that is God’s." Wow. And something that seems like it could have been true of some real medieval clerics, because the Church used to wield hegemonic political power and would attract the ambitious.

The quoted verse isn't from Job but from Isaiah.

It's odd for women not to be able to make altar cloth when embroidering them used to be part of the work of nuns.

"The opposite of pride is love." Interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that before.

For centuries, joining a convent was the only way a woman could escape an unwanted marriage and still have social support. That may be one reason "vocations" used to be more common but now have dropped off.

No matter what he does in the future, the fact that her father at least thought to ask if Aleys had a vocation immediately after she said she didn't want to marry suggests that he is not a terrible father, or at least didn't start out that way.

I'm not sure if the author plans on discussing this, but St. Clare was a contemporary of St. Francis and established an order for women that took vows of poverty as strict as those of the male Franciscans. Like all nuns at the time (1212), they were required to be enclosed, but the implication that they weren't any different from the other nuns at the time is incorrect.

Okay, so my previous question has just been answered. You can travel to the future at both Funiculi Funicula and La Donna Donna.

An interesting additional detail: you can add cream to the time-travel coffee without impacting its temperature (and thus your amount of time in the past).

"In this world, there are countless situations where sound reasoning doesn't necessarily lead to the right answer."

One of the previous books mentioned Cafe Donna Donna, and told the story of a woman who traveled to the future. It explained why this was rare and it made sense. But no one has ever traveled to the future from Cafe Funiculi Funicula, and it's described as a place where you can go back (but not forward) in time. I wonder if Cafe Donna Donna is unique in this regard.

I learned something new (verified by Google): "When the wind blows, the barrel-makers get rich" is the Japenese phrase that corresponds to "butterfly effect" in English.

The part about the Titanic is true. JP Morgan owned International Mercantile Marine, the company that owned the White Star Line and thus the Titanic. He had planned to occupy one of the famous parlor suites on his way back from Paris, but he got the flu and had to cancel at the last minute.